The Illusion of Progress: CORDS and the Crisis of Modernization in South Vietnam, 1965 –1968

02-C3737 1/19/06 11:41 AM Page 25 The Illusion of Progress: CORDS and the Crisis of Modernization in South Vietnam, 1965 –1968 CHRISTOPHER T. FISHER The author is a member of the history and African American Studies departments at The College of New Jersey. This article examines the relationship between pacification and modernization theory during Lyndon B. Johnson’s stewardship of the Vietnam War. It uses Johnson’s South Vietnamese pacification program, Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support (CORDS), to reveal the hopes, intentions, and limitations of the administration’s approach. This article contends that CORDS represented Johnson’s attempt to define the Vietnam conflict as a progressive expression of the Cold War through modernization theory. It also argues that CORDS’s inability to resolve the contradic- tions implicit in development and security exposed the limits of Johnson’s vision for both Vietnam and the Cold War. Finally, the article illustrates how interadministra- tive debates regarding the intersection of pacification and modernization anticipated intellectual tensions that divided modernization theorists and dominated the field in the 1970s. In 1967 the State Department’s Council of Policy and Planning commissioned Samuel Huntington, a Harvard University professor of international relations, to survey U.S. progress at win- ning the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people. After two months in the field, Huntington produced a ninety-five page report that blistered President Lyndon Johnson’s pacification and development program, known as Civil Operations and Revolution- ary Development Support (CORDS). The report contended that the program’s focus on rudimentary infrastructural change, such as building centralized political institutions, pooling resources, dis- seminating information, and promoting industrial growth, relied upon outmoded strategies of development that he and other theorists had abandoned years before renewed U.S. interest in the civil I would like to thank Michael Latham, Michael Adas, Lloyd Gardner, T. Christopher Jespersen, George White, James Livingston, and David Ekbladh, as well as the anonymous referees at the Pacific Historical Review. Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 75, No. 1, pages 25–51. ISSN 0030-8684 ©2006 by the Pacific Coast Branch, American Historical Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, at http://www.ucpress.edu/ journals/rights.htm. 25 02-C3737 1/19/06 11:41 AM Page 26 26 Pacific Historical Review side of the war.1 CORDS had none of the intellectual tension and diversity of opinion that shaped national discourse on development theory or appeared in the leading journals. It existed in a concep- tual vacuum, as if notions of modernization had never evolved beyond 1959. Although Huntington never made the accusation outright, the report was a veiled critique of Lyndon Johnson’s modernization theory guru and National Security Administration (NSA) Special Assis- tant, Walt Whitman Rostow. The former theorist from the Massachu- setts Institute of Technology (MIT) and author of The Stages of Economic Growth was both inspiration and cheerleader for the paradigm that framed the U.S. pacification effort in South Vietnam. As CORDS went, therefore, so went Rostow. Throughout his career, Huntington never abandoned the concept of development or its po- tential to remake the world in an image that served America’s inter- ests. Nevertheless, Huntington’s experience with CORDS validated his doubts about modernization theory and became an existential justification for a new approach to development that signaled the passing of modernization theory from the science of policymaking. Huntington’s encounter with the Johnson administration demonstrates a significant chasm in the history of America’s role in Vietnam—the influence that war had on theory. In the prevailing scholarship, particularly the studies on modernization theory and pacification, modernization is the engine of the U.S. tragedy and de- feat in South Vietnam. By contrast, scholars rarely examine how that failure itself affected theories of development and progress.2 The 1. To avoid confusion, the concepts “development,” “modernization,” and “modernization theory” will connote different things in this paper. Each meaning, however, is consonant with the prevailing historiography on modernization theory (see footnote 4). I use development to refer to the general process of improvement, modernization to denote accelerated development premised upon technological innovation and a staged process, and modernization theory to reflect the system of thought based upon accelerated growth. 2. The one notable and salient exception to the scholarship on the relationship between modernization theory and the realities of American diplomacy is a recent article by Mark T. Berger, “Decolonisation, Modernisation and Nation-Building: Political Development Theory and the Appeal of Communism in Southeast Asia, 1945–1975,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 34 (2003), 421– 448. Berger’s study, a bold attempt at lev- eling the ground of modernization theory literature, captures the spirit of the prevailing scholarship. Where it succeeds is also the locus of the article’s failure. Berger’s focus on the intellectual dynamics of modernization theory history leaves his claims about the administrative and policy connection between the paradigm and the physical reality wanting. 02-C3737 1/19/06 11:41 AM Page 27 Modernization in South Vietnam 27 pattern holds true in studies that range from Dwight Eisenhower’s nation-building exercise under the leadership of Ngo Dinh Diem to the Strategic Hamlet program in John F. Kennedy’s administration. Even scholarship that recognizes the intellectual strain and transfor- mation caused by conflict over Vietnam subordinates the relationship to larger administrative or societal lessons. This article uses the genesis of CORDS, and the dialogue that took place between its ar- chitects and Huntington, to explore the relationship between war and theory in Vietnam. Huntington’s critique foreshadowed a larger intellectual retreat from modernization theory that would redefine the field of development and play down its role in foreign policy. In CORDS, I contend, we see the passing of an idea. *** Until recently the relationship between pacification and modernization theory was contested ground. Pacification focused on physical and institutional security during combat, whereas modernization theory assumed a period of relative peace and rapid development.3 Michael Latham, however, obliterated that dichotomy by demonstrating how the United States fused pacification and modernization theory in its search for the right combination of security and civil reform in the hamlets of South Vietnam.4 What the President and his advisers sought was a coherent plan that could 3. For more on America’s pacification program in South Vietnam, see Richard A. Hunt, Pacification: The American Struggle for Vietnam’s Hearts and Minds (Boulder, Colo., 1995); Michael E. Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000); Jefferson P. Marquis, “The Other Warriors: American Social Science and Nation Building in Vietnam,” Diplomatic History, 24 (2000), 79–105; Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam (New York, 1978); Lewis Sorley, A Better War: The Unexamined Victories and Final Tragedy of America’s Last Years in Vietnam (New York, 1999); Patrick Lloyd Hatcher, The Suicide of an Elite: American Internationalists and Vietnam (Stanford, Calif., 1990); Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam (New York, 1988); D. Michael Shafer, Deadly Paradigms: The Failure of U.S. Counterinsurgency Policy (Princeton, N.J., 1988); R. W. Komer, Bureaucracy at War: U.S. Performance in the Vietnam Conflict (Boulder, Colo., 1986); Frances Fitzgerald, Fire in the Lake: The Vietnamese and the Americans in Vietnam (New York, 1972); William A. Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam (New York, 1966); Marilyn B. Young, The Viet- nam Wars, 1945–1990 (New York, 1991); and David L. Anderson, Trapped By Success: The Eisenhower Administration and Vietnam, 1953–1961 (New York, 1991). 4. Modernization theory has an extensive body of scholarship that recent studies in the Cold War have enhanced tremendously. The key works on the relationship between modernization theory and U.S. foreign policy include Nils Gilman, Mandarins of the Fu- ture: Modernization Theory in Cold War America (Washington, D.C., 2004); David Engerman, Nils Gilman, Mark H. Haefele, and Michael E. Latham, eds., Staging Growth: Moderniza- tion, Development, and the Global Cold War (Amherst, Mass., 2003); Marc Frey, “Tools of 02-C3737 1/19/06 11:41 AM Page 28 28 Pacific Historical Review jumpstart economic and social development for the South Viet- namese. Similar to the intellectual debates of the early 1960s, in which scholars such as Huntington and MIT sociologist Daniel Lerner wrangled over the military’s place in the modernization process, Johnson’s advisers believed both that security was a precondi- tion for growth and that sustained development framed America’s presence in South Vietnam. Modernization theory, therefore, is cru- cial to understanding Johnson’s shift in rhetoric and policy in the latter years of his stewardship of the Vietnam War. Modernization

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